Scientists who authored a paper on the origins of COVID-19 agreed the best course of action was to downplay the Chinese lab leak theory over concerns about international fallout, newly released internal messages show.
Dr. Andrew Rambaut and Dr. Kristian Andersen discussed the issue in an early February 2020 Slack conversation with colleagues, which took place several weeks before their “Proximal Origin” report got published in the journal Nature Medicine in March of the same year.
Rambaut, on February 2, 2020, said, “given the s*** show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape, so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”